Sorry, you do not know many people who watch porn. A close friend of mine owns a video store (well, his parents do, but he does a lot of work in it on his free time), and another friend of mine works there. When I want to hang out with either of them, it's often times at the video store (friend #2 works the evening-night shift). I've seen guys come in and drop $50 renting porn. I've heard stores about guys coming in at opening (11 am), dropping $25, and then coming back that night and dropping $25 more. I would say the average spent per porn renter over a 6 month period of observations is about $25 in a go. What they do with that much porn, I don't know. I don't want to venture a guess. But my argument is, porn-guys (and girls) will drop some serious green-backs to fuel their habit.
Of course, the MPAA could also say you're stealing from them if you tell someone the plot of a movie and they decide not to plunk down their $7.50 - $10.50 (depending on where you are) for the movie.
So there is some grey area in all of this. Face it. They release their product into the public forum, and the type of product they release has qualities that will lose them money for a number of reasons. If they were releasing cars, they lose a lot of that risk, but deal with a different industry. It's all just capitalism. If they think they are not operating at the level they want to be, adjust or get out of the business. Easy choices.
This is far more insidious. Unlike Divx, most customers probably won't have the foresight to research this beforehand, and will buy it before they research the ramifications. Retailers will start adopting policies to prevent people from returning the discs because of these issues, and suddenly we don't have a choice anymore. This is something that requires a grassroots style campaign to garner support from several thousand dvd buyers saying "We will not buy any dvd's supporting these policies".
int numberSupporters = 10,000;
float avgCostPerMovie = 19.99;
int avgNumberMoviesPerYear = 10;
After reading their idea for the plot, I didn't think it was half-bad. Lot's of idea for plot twists and intrigue.
Then I realized it was satire... {sigh}
If they had done the upfront design work (and they may have, FAIK), they could have made the graphic subsystem modular so they could drop in an opengl implementation without changing anything else. Just perform all their optimizations in the individual graphic library wrappers.
I have to say that at the very least, I have had numerous problems, such as inserting the cd, having the autoplay menu come up, clicking on the "start playing half-life 2" option, and having nothing happen... nothing at all. Or when I do load the game, it does in fact take steam a little bit (I'm talking like 20 - 40 seconds, certainly less than a minute) to talk to the servers, do it's handshaking, whatever, and then get back to start loading half-life 2. I have to agree with the comments that this is an entirely unnecessary step. My system is by no means lagging, certainly well above and beyond the recommended requirements. It's not the fastest thing on the block, but it shouldn't have to be either, given that providing a solution that didn't require everyone to buy a new system was one of Valve's stated goals for HL2.
Worst case scenario, they've chilled peoples reaction to a game they were looking forward to (they sure have given me regrets about buying the game, not about playing it though). They dropped the ball here, first by offering it through a new, reasonable distribution channel to cut out the middle man, but not eliminating the extra money that the middle men tack onto the price ($50 is too much for a client I'm downloading, when they don't have to pay a publisher/distributor or for printed materials, packaging, and the retail chain doesn't add their markup on the end). Unreal Tournament 2004 & BF:Vietname both retailed at a significantly reduced cost over similar offerings, and they were retail distributions. I could have given Valve my money directly, but not when they're trying to play the retailers game. At least with the cd I have something lasting (plus I got a $20 off an ATI card coupon in the box (well, 7 of them to be precise), and I've been planning to buy a new card), so technically with the rebate, I paid less than the online delivery method.
Re:Hopefully not as terrible as the first
on
Halo 2 Released
·
· Score: 1
Actually, the fact that I never felt like I needed a keyboard and a mouse while playing it is what made me enjoy the first Halo so much.
Well that and some simply amazing environments (boring repetive areas aside). I have fond memories of taking my chem principles II final, taking the day off of work, and driving the Scorpion through the snowy canyon. The scene where you get dropped off the back of a transport onto the beach in the middle of the fire-fight is also high on my list of great gaming moments.
... and unfortunately we're all developing on XP machines (although I run a slackware virtual machine). I'm currently rewriting TOra in C# to be released under some sort of GPL type license, with additional support for different database implementations (only MYSQL right at the moment, SQL Server already comes with Query Analyzer).
Any helpful suggestions/questions/comments/hate mail (for using C#) can be forwarded on to me. Right now I've only got the SQL window and result set windows operational, but it will be up at sourceforge once it becomes remotely useful.
I've been writing in Java for 6 years professionally, and been playing with it since I picked up the beta with one of the original programming books in '96ish time frame.
Lately I've been playing with C#, and while I don't particularly care for Microsofts business practices, they put out some pretty good development tools. C# is a damn fine language that seems to have learned from the mistakes others have made while taking away the good stuff.
Java has way too many things that bug me. Little things here or there. C# pretty much got rid of them. Off the top of my head, overloading operators is a big one for me. I tend to write a lot of mathematical manipulations, and being able to overload the operators to naturally manipulate custom data structures is a huge benefit from my standpoint. I mean if you want to write a method to do it in Java and then have to make explicit method calls feel free... You're stupid, but feel free. I'd rather just work with it naturally.
The Java GUI library is crap, and with rare exceptions (sweet sweet firefox) doesn't produce attractive apps.
C++ is still my favorite development language, but I don't want to write tons of boilerplate code, deal with messy structure, or have to deal with custom memory managers everytime I write an app.
For those who are putting down Mono as some kind of stupid side project, stop stroking your self. I'm a little tired of sysadmins out there who know a little scripting coming off like they are developers. It's a pretty ambitious undertaking for anyone to work on in their spare time. And just because a Microsoft team developed C# doesn't mean it's going to just be a Microsoft development language. The C# spec has been accepted by ISO and anyone can write a C# compiler at this point.
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Sorry, you do not know many people who watch porn. A close friend of mine owns a video store (well, his parents do, but he does a lot of work in it on his free time), and another friend of mine works there. When I want to hang out with either of them, it's often times at the video store (friend #2 works the evening-night shift). I've seen guys come in and drop $50 renting porn. I've heard stores about guys coming in at opening (11 am), dropping $25, and then coming back that night and dropping $25 more. I would say the average spent per porn renter over a 6 month period of observations is about $25 in a go. What they do with that much porn, I don't know. I don't want to venture a guess. But my argument is, porn-guys (and girls) will drop some serious green-backs to fuel their habit.
I used to work at Red Storm Entertainment, and Ubisoft took them over. Is karma just coming around?
// I don't know if ubisoft buying red storm was a good or bad thing, I had already left by then.
...after all, the terms of their use of the name "Apple" was that they never would never be in the music business. That went out the door pretty fast.
Of course, the MPAA could also say you're stealing from them if you tell someone the plot of a movie and they decide not to plunk down their $7.50 - $10.50 (depending on where you are) for the movie. So there is some grey area in all of this. Face it. They release their product into the public forum, and the type of product they release has qualities that will lose them money for a number of reasons. If they were releasing cars, they lose a lot of that risk, but deal with a different industry. It's all just capitalism. If they think they are not operating at the level they want to be, adjust or get out of the business. Easy choices.
This is far more insidious. Unlike Divx, most customers probably won't have the foresight to research this beforehand, and will buy it before they research the ramifications. Retailers will start adopting policies to prevent people from returning the discs because of these issues, and suddenly we don't have a choice anymore. This is something that requires a grassroots style campaign to garner support from several thousand dvd buyers saying "We will not buy any dvd's supporting these policies".
int numberSupporters = 10,000;
float avgCostPerMovie = 19.99;
int avgNumberMoviesPerYear = 10;
double lossToMPAA = numberSupporters * avgCostPerMovie * avgNumberMoviesPerYear;
cout << '$' << lossToMPAA << endl;
$1,999,000
Not that much in a billion dollar industry, but it's still a financial attack on the industry.
After reading their idea for the plot, I didn't think it was half-bad. Lot's of idea for plot twists and intrigue. Then I realized it was satire... {sigh}
Of course that doesn't remove the need to port other Win32 specific areas.
/Before someone else brought it up.
If they had done the upfront design work (and they may have, FAIK), they could have made the graphic subsystem modular so they could drop in an opengl implementation without changing anything else. Just perform all their optimizations in the individual graphic library wrappers.
Repeating yourself won't make it true.
I have to say that at the very least, I have had numerous problems, such as inserting the cd, having the autoplay menu come up, clicking on the "start playing half-life 2" option, and having nothing happen... nothing at all. Or when I do load the game, it does in fact take steam a little bit (I'm talking like 20 - 40 seconds, certainly less than a minute) to talk to the servers, do it's handshaking, whatever, and then get back to start loading half-life 2. I have to agree with the comments that this is an entirely unnecessary step. My system is by no means lagging, certainly well above and beyond the recommended requirements. It's not the fastest thing on the block, but it shouldn't have to be either, given that providing a solution that didn't require everyone to buy a new system was one of Valve's stated goals for HL2.
Worst case scenario, they've chilled peoples reaction to a game they were looking forward to (they sure have given me regrets about buying the game, not about playing it though). They dropped the ball here, first by offering it through a new, reasonable distribution channel to cut out the middle man, but not eliminating the extra money that the middle men tack onto the price ($50 is too much for a client I'm downloading, when they don't have to pay a publisher/distributor or for printed materials, packaging, and the retail chain doesn't add their markup on the end). Unreal Tournament 2004 & BF:Vietname both retailed at a significantly reduced cost over similar offerings, and they were retail distributions. I could have given Valve my money directly, but not when they're trying to play the retailers game. At least with the cd I have something lasting (plus I got a $20 off an ATI card coupon in the box (well, 7 of them to be precise), and I've been planning to buy a new card), so technically with the rebate, I paid less than the online delivery method.
Maybe the other people are wrong about it not taking longer? You know, the obvious answer.
It's the Fahrenheit 9/11 of the Halo world.
//Still thought the movie had a good message
Actually, the fact that I never felt like I needed a keyboard and a mouse while playing it is what made me enjoy the first Halo so much. Well that and some simply amazing environments (boring repetive areas aside). I have fond memories of taking my chem principles II final, taking the day off of work, and driving the Scorpion through the snowy canyon. The scene where you get dropped off the back of a transport onto the beach in the middle of the fire-fight is also high on my list of great gaming moments.
... and unfortunately we're all developing on XP machines (although I run a slackware virtual machine). I'm currently rewriting TOra in C# to be released under some sort of GPL type license, with additional support for different database implementations (only MYSQL right at the moment, SQL Server already comes with Query Analyzer). Any helpful suggestions/questions/comments/hate mail (for using C#) can be forwarded on to me. Right now I've only got the SQL window and result set windows operational, but it will be up at sourceforge once it becomes remotely useful.
I've been writing in Java for 6 years professionally, and been playing with it since I picked up the beta with one of the original programming books in '96ish time frame. Lately I've been playing with C#, and while I don't particularly care for Microsofts business practices, they put out some pretty good development tools. C# is a damn fine language that seems to have learned from the mistakes others have made while taking away the good stuff. Java has way too many things that bug me. Little things here or there. C# pretty much got rid of them. Off the top of my head, overloading operators is a big one for me. I tend to write a lot of mathematical manipulations, and being able to overload the operators to naturally manipulate custom data structures is a huge benefit from my standpoint. I mean if you want to write a method to do it in Java and then have to make explicit method calls feel free... You're stupid, but feel free. I'd rather just work with it naturally. The Java GUI library is crap, and with rare exceptions (sweet sweet firefox) doesn't produce attractive apps. C++ is still my favorite development language, but I don't want to write tons of boilerplate code, deal with messy structure, or have to deal with custom memory managers everytime I write an app. For those who are putting down Mono as some kind of stupid side project, stop stroking your self. I'm a little tired of sysadmins out there who know a little scripting coming off like they are developers. It's a pretty ambitious undertaking for anyone to work on in their spare time. And just because a Microsoft team developed C# doesn't mean it's going to just be a Microsoft development language. The C# spec has been accepted by ISO and anyone can write a C# compiler at this point.